Thom said to The Daily Telegraph after the release of the band’s sixth album, Hail To The Thief. He knew by now that some kind of a “lurch” was exactly what the public and the press were expecting. It was a new and bizarre form of pressure. The pressure to do absolutely anything they wanted, as long as it was completely different to anything they’d done before. He spent six months doing nothing except being a father until, he says, Rachel suggested: “‘Why don’t you just do a record where you let it happen? No agenda, nothing.’ And that sort of made things click.” Ed O’Brien said, “The whole thing was to do it quickly and not think about it too much, which was new for us, obviously.” They’d vaguely thought about knocking out an album quickly before, but this time they meant it. They couldn’t take another three years like the ones leading up to the release of Kid A and Amnesiac. They went back into their rehearsal space and tried out the new songs for three months as they had prior to OK Computer, recording the results every day and listening to the tapes every evening.
